In a previous article we compared a postcard from the Symbionese Liberation Army 'Hearnap' FBI files threatening the daughter of President Richard Nixon, to the Citizen Card purportedly mailed by the Zodiac Killer. The composition of the Citizen Card, expressing consternation and concern at the running of advertisements for the Badlands movie and signing off with "A citizen", was compared to the Richard Nixon Postcard with respect to "A concerned citizen". This, coupled with similarities between the February 3rd 1974 SLA Letter and a communication dated February 10th 1974 from the Symbionese Liberation Army, led to the conclusion that neither the Citizen Card or SLA Letter were penned by the Zodiac Killer. This has been questioned, leading to speculation that the Zodiac Killer may in fact have been responsible for both the Richard Nixon Postcard mailed on May 23rd 1974 and the Citizen Card mailed on May 8th 1974.     

Just prior to these two communications the Symbionese Liberation mailed a similar threat to Randolph Hearst stating "It now appears to SLA that he would rather sacrifice his daughters life than to print the truth to the American people". The message finished with "We wish C.B.S, A.B.C. or N.B.C. would dedicate one hour of national network time to the founder of C.C.S.D. so the man could deliver a message to the people that could save the nation from political disaster and economical destruction". The man they wanted to be given air time was Roland L. Hayes from the corporation of Concerned Citizens for Social Development (C.C.S.D) - and included his writings. This man clearly inspired the Symbionese Liberation Army with his message of fighting for the people against corporate greed and the likes of Randolph Hearst. Is it therefore surprising that several weeks later, a postcard was mailed to President Richard Nixon invoking a threat on his daughter and signing off with "A concerned citizen for freedom"? As can be seen in the excerpts below the SLA directive, Roland L. Hayes titled many of his sections "concerned citizens for social development" and subtitled one "The President", detailing President Richard Nixon on more than one occasion.

When we look at the wording on the Richard Nixon Postcard "Dear King, We know where Patty Hearst is. But wait till we get your daughter. A concerned citizen for freedom", the comparisons can be noted. With the Citizen Card sandwiched in between the Dear Mr. Chancellor Letter and the "Dear King" Richard Nixon Postcard, we have more cause for concern about the validity of the May 8th 1974 communication as a Zodiac Killer offering. It was directing its consternation at the running of ads by the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner - two newspapers previously highlighted with ire by the Symbionese Liberation Army because of their connection to Randolph Hearst.

To view the entire FBI documents on this matter, visit page 400 of the Hearnap files, part 36 of 42.

Here is another interesting feature, discovered by investigators written on the apartment wall of a previously occupied Symbionese Liberation Army residence. The discovery would have been prior to the July 8th 1974 Red Phantom Letter, signing off with "the Red Phantom (red with rage)". The message scrawled on the wall began "Every day my rage grows fonder of the poison I pack into the heads of my bullets". But did this rage last until July 8th 1974?

The 13 Symbol Cipher is simply too short for any meaningful decryption without a key or the answer. It is certainly possible to arrive at the correct solution using a key provided by Zodiac, but then you have to prove that the key you have found is the correct one, and your implemented methodology is plausible. The best way to find the solution to the Z13, as it was for the 32 Symbol Cipher, is to do absolutely no work whatsoever and just let the Zodiac Killer give us the exact answer. On this occasion, the Zodiac Killer designed the code and waited nearly six months to supply us with a verbatim solution.

The first thing to examine in the 13 Symbol Cipher is the circled triple 8 configuration. This is the feature that stands out in the code the most and where one would envisage the answer residing. Identify the meaning of the three eights and in what context they were chosen, and half the battle may be won. We can add the numbers up to create birth years and ages, but without instruction to do so, it could be argued that the idea rests in our head and not the Zodiac's. Therefore, we shall take the number 888 as one complete entity.

In Christian numerology, the number 888 represents Jesus, or sometimes more specifically Christ the Redeemer. This representation may be justified either through gematria, by counting the letter values of the Greek transliteration of Jesus' name, or as an opposing value to 666, the number of the beast. Wikipedia. This could indicate a Christian element to the code, especially when we consider the Zodiac's Celtic Cross, a form of Christian cross featuring a nimbus or ring that emerged in Ireland and Britain in the Early Middle Ages. The shape, usually decorated with interlace and other motifs from Insular art, became popular for funerary monuments and other uses. Then we have the tenth character in the code, likened to an upside down Aries symbol. However, when we consider the above and the Zodiac Killer's musings of an afterlife, another possibility emerges. Christians adopted the anchor as a symbol of hope in future existence because the anchor was regarded in ancient times as a symbol of safety. For Christians, Christ is the unfailing hope of all who believe in him: Saint Peter, Saint Paul, and several of the early Church Fathers speak in this sense. The Epistle to the Hebrews 6:19-20 for the first time connects the idea of hope with the symbol of the anchor. Wikipedia. This effectively ties five of Zodiac's characters under the Christian banner and the premise of an afterlife.   

On January 29th 1970, the Yellow Cab Company put up a thousand dollar reward for any information leading to the arrest of the Zodiac Killer. In addition, the Teamsters Union which represents the Yellow Cab Company were reported in the San Francisco Chronicle to be considering offering a further reward on February 8th 1970 in the case of Paul Stine and Charles Jarman (another taxicab murder victim). The April 20th 1970 letter gave us the code and was immediately followed by "I am mildly cerous as to how much money you have on my head now". The October 5th 1970 postcard gave us the possible solution of "Fk, I'm crackproof" and was immediately followed by "What is the price tag now". These are the only two communications in which the Zodiac Killer asked the police the price of his capture. These two communications not only had a code and an answer that fitted the code, but both were followed by the exact same question. When the Zodiac Killer was designing his 13 Hole Postcard, it is very likely he had at his disposal a copy of his original April 20th 1970 letter, or the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper cutting below, to which he was now supplying the answer. This may have been the trigger that influenced him to repeat the phrase "how much money you have on my head now" into the very similar "What is the price tag now". The Zodiac Killer, in essence, had inadvertently bound both communications together through phraseology, as well as code and solution.   

The Zodiac Killer introduction would now give us his name (albeit his initials) in absence of his full name. It would also read fluently as a sentence, as follows: "This is the Zodiac speaking. By the way have you cracked the last cipher I sent you? My name is Fk, I'm crackproof". Nobody realistically believed he was going to supply his full name, but this way he satisfies the promise in a restricted format. Two communications mailed nearly six months apart, with a solution that satisfies the code, as well as a satisfactory introduction to the code - and both followed by the same question.  

This has been covered before, but I just wanted to expand in a little more detail without pinpointing a particular location.

How embarassing is the notion of a 50-year-old unsolved cipher, that we were given the answer to in just thirty one days? - and an answer that came straight from the horse's mouth. The 32 Symbol Cipher solution was served to us on a silver platter in the July 26th 1970 Little List Letter using the Zodiac crosshairs and six words. 

When the Button Letter was mailed on June 26th 1970, the Zodiac Killer gave us a map of San Francisco and Vicinity with his crosshairs centered over Mount Diablo, stating "the map coupled with this code will tell you where the bomb is set." If we were to find a perceived bomb, it is fairly obvious we have to travel a certain angle and distance from the top of Mount Diablo to find the location. Therefore, the 32 symbol code, if it served any purpose whatsoever, had to contain a measurement in the form of degrees and distance. The map scale was 6.4 miles to the inch - so that will be the distance the Zodiac Killer has to employ from Mount Diablo to make any sense. The degrees he used was radians, because he told us so in the July 26th 1970 Little List Letter. The Zodiac stated "P.S. The Mt. Diablo code concerns Radians + # inches along the radians". He is actually telling us that the 32 symbol code contains radians and inches in the solution.

"P.S. The Mt. Diablo code concerns (is about ) (has to do with) Radians + # inches along the radians". Any cipher expert such as David Oranchak, or quite frankly, any Joe Bloggs such as myself, will tell you that a 32 symbol code with only three repeating characters is unsolvable without a key. The Zodiac Killer was certainly no muppet - and clearly knew this when he concocted this jumble of random characters. But he gave us a large chunk of the key a mere 31 days later in the form of an arrow and a hashtag, writing "Radians and # inches along the radians" on a separate line to distinguish the very fact. We just had to key in the number. The symbol # is most commonly known as the number sign, The symbol is described as the "number" character in an 1853 treatise on bookkeeping, and its double meaning is described in a bookkeeping text from 1880. The instruction manual of the Blickensderfer model 5 typewriter (c. 1896) appears to refer to the symbol as the "number mark". Some early-20th-century U.S. sources refer to it as the "number sign", although this could also refer to the numero sign. A 1917 manual distinguishes between two uses of the sign: "number (written before a figure)"; and "pounds (written after a figure)". Mainstream use in the United States is as follows: when it prefixes a number, it is read as "number", as in "a #2 pencil" (indicating "a number-two pencil"). The one exception is with the # key on a phone, which is always referred to as the "pound key" or "pound". Thus instructions to dial an extension such as #77 are always read as "pound seven seven". Wikipedia.

All of Zodiac's bomb threats were mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper - even detailing the murder of San Francisco police officer Brian McDonnell on February 16th 1970, who suffered devastating and sadly fatal injuries when a bomb packed with fence staples exploded on an outside ledge of Park Police Station in the Upper Haight neighborhood of San Francisco. The Zodiac constantly signed off his communications with the barbed acronym SFPD = 0 and threatened "there is more glory in killing a cop than a cid because a cop can shoot back". If that wasn't enough, the Phillips 66 Road Map was labelled San Francisco and Vicinity.  Based on a map scale of 6.4 miles to the inch, only 5 inches would land in San Francisco (4 and 6 inches would fall into the sea, other than Treasure Island). Fortunately, the Zodiac Killer gave us the angle from Mount Diablo, courtesy of his bold, black circle on the Little List crosshairs. It fell 4 radians (and magnetic north) clockwise from his arrowed pointer, around the clock face he provided. Radians are usually measured counter-clockwise, but the Zodiac Killer placed the bold circle exactly 4 radians "set to Mag.N" clockwise.

The answer was now extremely simple. All we had to do was insert a number in place of the hashtag, shown by the big flashing arrow pointing us in the right direction. The hashtag conveniently preceded "inches", so it's here we will slot in the number 5 - and bingo - we have our answer to the inches component of "Radians + 5 inches along the radians" or "Radians and 5 inches along the radians". The full answer of "four radians and five inches", coupled with the magnetic north value of 17 degrees would be our guide.  As with all the best puzzles, the answer is usually hidden in plain sight. Druzer, an avid Zodiac researcher, came up with a solution to the 32 character code which I believe is correct, when he suggested Estimate: four radians and five inches. This solution not only satisfies the 32 characters, but correlates three plaintext letters to the only three repeating ciphertext characters in the code, thereby providing a perfectly valid key. See The Blast Estimate of Zodiac, The Blast Estimate of Zodiac (Part Two). and The Blast Estimate of Zodiac (Part Three). The map scale is 6.4 miles to the inch. This gives us a distance of 6.4 multiplied by 5 (inches). Therefore, the bomb was to be set at 4 radians and magnetic north, and 32 miles from the peak of Mount Diablo. The only San Francisco Police Department that comes anywhere close is Ingleside Police Station. This San Francisco Police Department sits at 30.96 miles from the peak of Mount Diablo (4.84 inches). It also sits at 251 degrees from the peak of Mount Diablo (4.08 radians).

The Zodiac Killer gave us a rough guide of 4 radians and magnetic north, and 5 inches (hence the word "estimate"). If he had given us the exact measurement, it would have been 4.08 radians and 4.84 inches, He was clearly giving us an approximate measurement. Since Ingleside Police Station was the only San Francisco Police Department anywhere close to these measurements, it's fairly obvious this was his target. The Zodiac Killer's distance in miles was 96.8% accurate. His angular accuracy in degrees was 98.0%. The Zodiac Killer was very unlikely to have selected a specific target that fell on an exact whole number of radians and inches.   

In the Little List communication it is apparent that Zodiac Killer gave us two prominent crosshairs: [1] with the accentuated black circle with SFPD=0 alongside, and [2] the extra large crosshairs with "P.S. The Mt. Diablo code concerns Radians + # inches along the radians" scrawled across it. Attaching these important additions was clearly done for purpose, thereby informing us of the radian value required, and the correlation between the crosshairs on the Phillips 66 Map and the measurements of radians and inches. With 29 unique characters in a 32 character code, any correlation between the characters and alphabetical solution was always going to be minimal, therefore it is encumbent upon us to look to other reasons for its design. The Blast Estimate of Zodiac (Part Three). 

In a series of articles it has been shown that the Zodiac Killer was extremely unlikely to have reappeared in 1974 firing off four communications - of which three were primarily aimed at the feature film industry, newspaper advertising and columnists - with the other referring to the SLA directly. If this was the Zodiac Killer, then it seems he had suddenly become a film critic, calling for the removal of advertisements for the Badlands movie and the cancelling of the San Francisco Chronicle's Count Marco column. The Zodiac Killer was suddenly objecting to murder glorification, the very thing he perpetrated to propel his pseudonym onto the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner and Vallejo Times-Herald. He was perfectly comfortable stabbing and shooting defenceless women in the back, but was now furious with the male chauvinist Count Marco for his ridicule of women. The claim that the Zodiac Killer had now apparently turned his life around and was repenting for his sins is an extremely difficult argument to sell, when we consider that a far better option exists with the left-wing militant organization of the Symbionese Liberation Army. This group fought for the rights of women, the oppressed and the hungry, albeit with a misguided view of how to achieve it. Their disdain for the Hearst Corporation, the capitalist media and the greedy corporations was evident in everything they wrote - and saturated throughout the four communications mailed from January 29th to July 8th of 1974. In a previous article, inspired by the findings of Rubislaw32, we showed a 5/23/74 communication that threatened the daughter of President Richard Nixon and signed off with "a concerned citizen", postmarked only 15 days after the "Citizen Card" purportedly mailed by the Zodiac Killer.    

It has been argued that the Symbionese Liberation Army mimicked the Zodiac Killer many times, but equally, some of their communications may have inadvertently been mistaken for the Bay Area murderer. Several members of the group even mimicked the Zodiac introduction of "This is the Zodiac Speaking" in a series of taped communications spanning February through June of 1974, with a barrage of threats toward Randolph A. Hearst, the newspapers and various corporate entities

On February 8th 1974, Donald David DeFreeze sent Taped Comminique No.4, beginning "My name is Cinque and to my comrades I am known as Cin. I am a Black man and a representative of Black people. I hold the rank of General Field Marshal in the United Federated Forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Today I have received an order from the Symbionese War Council, the Court of the People, to the effect I am ordered to convey the following message in behalf of the SLA and to insert a taped word of comfort and verification that Patricia Campbell Hearst is alive and safe". This was one of many taped messages from members of the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974.  

The communique continued, protesting the Hearst family and their profiteering from murder and suffering, primarily through the newspapers of the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner. Not surprising then, that on May 8th 1974, the San Francisco Chronicle should receive the "Citizen Card" stating "Sirs -- I would like to expression my consternation concerning your poor taste + lack of sympathy for the public, as evidenced by your running of the ads for the movie "Badlands", featuring the blurb: "In 1959 most people were killing time. Kit + Holly were killing people." In light of recent events, this kind of murder-glorification can only be deplorable at best (not that glorification of violence was ever justifiable) why don't you show some concern for public sensibilities + cut the ad?  A citizen". Followed only 15 days later from another "concerned citizen", threatening the White House of Richard Nixon, who is equally highlighted in the taped communiques of the Symbionese Liberation Army.  

Although the Hearst Corporation were not directly involved with the Exorcist and Badlands movies, the disdain for their involvement in "propaganda films for both national and international use" is apparent and relevant. when we consider the mocking nature of the Exorcist Letter towards the film on January 29th 1974, and the concern over the Badlands movie and its murder glorification in the newspapers through advertising on May 8th 1974. This is further bolstered when we consider the confrontation between Orson Welles and Randolph Hearst with regard to the "Citizen Kane" film (released on May 8th 1941 in Los Angeles), with Randolph Hearst demanding that the newspapers "cut the ads" for the film after becoming aware the movie was depicting him as the central character. The May 8th 1974 Citizen Card combined all the elements of "cutting ads", Randolph Hearst, Citizen Kane, "murder glorification" and the San Francisco Chronicle under one neat banner - and all referenced in the taped communiques of the Symbionese Liberation Army, spanning not only the Citizen Card, but encompassing all 1974 communications thought to be from the Zodiac Killer  

Then came the spoken introductions to some of the taped Symbionese Liberation Army messages. Was this further proof that the Symbionese Liberation Army were mimicking the Zodiac Killer, at a time when the newspapers were replete with column inches speculating the return of the Zodiac Killer?